Just now reading them for the first time, they’re hilarious. And I’m incredibly surprised that there’s a comment that me commenting on ISN’T a SUPER-necro. Like, years afterward. Actually, that’d be kind of funny…

Just wanted to say it is now Feb 28, 2013 in the Real World. One month more, and it will have been six years to the date of posting the comic.

And I expect this to website to last many more years, providing much needed relief and merriment to all the weary souls trudging through this world, seeking the warmth of a tavern hearth on a wintry night. Never you mind the spelling mistakes on the name plate outside, fellow traveler. For once inside, do they not only add to your chuckle, started by the promise of sweet spiced wine and soft beds?

(OMFG. Have I just stepped into the Hotel California of RPGs?)

First post, only recently started reading it, and already pained at the prospect of having to end reading this series, since it is complete. Absolute Awesomeness, Mr. Young.

I’ve never played D&D (yet), and I don’t like the LotR movies all that much. But this comic is quite possibly one of the best I’ve ever read. And I’ve read a LOT of comics :)

If the author ever reads this, great job mate. Bloody awesome. I would say keep up the good work but considering this was posted so long ago and is still up I’ll presume you got some kind of recognition that you so clearly deserve.

It’s still here, and providing as much laughter as it did 8 years ago to a first time reader. Makes me realise how old 3.5 ed is that 5th has come out (still play 3.5 though, as a 17yo DM on a budget I picked the books with the coolest covers)

As 2017 approaches in the wake of a global catastrophe of a year, I take solace in the fact that I am not the only new reader of this magnificent webcomic. May it continue to bring laughs to everyone in the years to come!

Ok, pithy and not at all funny, but someone had to say it. I love those moments in games where you finally, after years of rolling poorly, get to go first, only to find out there’s absolutely nothing you can do.

I usually make something up along the lines of “I ready my weapons” or “I check my shoelaces”, or when feeling particularly munchin-esque, “I try to inspire a +1 modifier in the archers by bellowing a war-cry”.

Well, if you have initiative first, can’t you choose to hold onto it and wait for other people to go, and then jump in and exert the right to take your action at any time? That’s a pretty useful bonus even if you don’t get first action in the battle.

superfluousk Says:”Well, if you have initiative first, can’t you choose to hold onto it and wait for other people to go, and then jump in and exert the right to take your action at any time? That’s a pretty useful bonus even if you don’t get first action in the battle.”

Yeah like ready his battle axe to throw at any unusual looking orc charging with any device out of a Spy Vs. Spy comic.

Although rolling 10,000 initiatives sounds daunting, after rolling 10,000 sets of stats, allocating them, leveling-up 10,000 orcs, allocating skills and feats and equiping them out it is a trivial task, almost enjoyable.

The bad part is the endless arguing over how initiative ties are resolved with players who can’t remember a rule for two consecutive rolls and those who dumped their DEX without working out all the ramifications, all done over the endless cries of the dimwit yelling “I Cleave!” every three seconds.

You’d need a big initiative whiteboard and a bunch of pens though. Best to choose the non-solvent-based kind too, lest the cast pass out during the pre-battle sums.

Probably best to treat the battle like a backdrop, and focus on the PCs. Much like the film, actually. The PCs then get a bunch of chances to affect the course of the battle; in this case, they can try to delay the orcs from taking the wall, then hold them off while the NPCs fall back to the keep. After that they distract the orcs while the gate is braced. These were the major events in the film, and this is exactly what the game should focus on. There’s very little point taking the time to roll for a random mook orc attacking a random mook defender, stick with the ones attacking the PCs.

So what you do, then, is ready to attack any baddie that comes within melee range. You still go before your enemy, your initiative is adjusted to come just before said enemy for future rounds, and you’re a happy dwarf. :)

Actually, I’ll watch that part of the film now w/ a smile thinking that all the thousands were waiting for the initiative roll & he just didn’t & let fly! “Bad form, what?” calls out the Uruk Hai captain.

That part (among man others, though I do still love the films) of Two Towers made me shake my head. Why would the orcs stop in bow-shot range before charging? And why wouldn’t the rest of the defenders take adavantage & shoot a bunch more?

Well, IIRC the orcs were beating their shields to demoralise the enemy. Historical warriors would sometimes do the same thing. As for why they did it in archery range, they outnumbered the men by dozens of times, and I guess it was their way of showing utter contempt for them.

An interesting scenario:
Our group of 4 level 13s walk into a courtyard. There are 30 soldiers in front of us with swords and shields, and 20 on the walls with bows and arrows.

Initiative is rolled and the team’s Warforged Monk goes first. It feels a bit silly to charge in, but he goes “whatever” and does it. He charges right into the first line of troups, getting all of their attention. On the next round, 15 of the soldiers tried to pile aroudn him while the rest attacked us.

He actually ended up dividing their melee troups in half. He never once took a hit, and had the biggest kill count of us all.

There’s a situation where winning initiative in a similar situation as today’s actually helped.

If we faced 10,000 soldiers I’m sure things would have been different, though.

All I can say to that, since my character is a mage is: CHAIN LIGHTNING!

…Which hits a maximum of 20 men, even at level 20. No, you want AoE spells for maximum effect. At low levels, fireball will kill hundreds of orcs in dense formation, and wall of fire will block an area for as long as you concentrate. Summon swarm deserves a mention for being “concentration” duration too, although they won’t kill many orcs very fast. Should really mess up formations though.
At higher levels, you have access to larger numbers of the lower level spells plus a few more goodies. Cloudkill has the same area as a fireball, but hangs around for many minutes killing any who enter it. Symbols of sleep, persuasion, weakness and insanity, although non-lethal, can affect over a thousand orcs in the first burst alone, are uncapped, and hang around for over an hour.
At really high levels, your caster can easily defeat the army single-handed. A cleric’s Holy Word spell should kill over a thousand orcs outright. Fire Storm can kill up to a thousand at a distance, and the AoE on Storm of Vengeance is so large it can easily wipe out the entire army in one go (Plus your side too if you forget to send them inside first).
On the wizard side, Incendiary Cloud is similar to Cloudkill but you can reposition it each round, and Sunburst and Meteor Swarm can each affect up to 5000 orcs in dense formation. Of course, by this point we’re talking about a guy near the level cap, so it’s not really surprising.

Am I the only one that noticed that the DM’s response to the request for Monty Python quotes, WAS a Monty Python quote.
And to Blindeye YAAAAAY Warforged. Probably my fav. type of character in the Ebberon series.

Initiative would be the least of your Dungeon Mastering worries in this kind of DnD scenario. You could roll once and then adjust that number according to the initiative bonuses of your monsters. Or you could have a computer do it. Computers love to count to 1 from 0, but they can do it really fast.

The biggest issue is that if you end up with a level difference of 6 or more between opponents, you may as well not fight the battle. Gimli is a fairly powerful hero, likely 10th level but possibly higher. Orcs in DnD are rated at CR1/2. Uruk Hai are likely CR1 and maybe CR2. Commanders may have up to 5 levels of warrior on top of their challenge rating adjustment. Translating all of this out of DnD-cant and back to Common: Gimli the 10th level DnD dwarf fighter could theoretically take out the Host of Mordor by himself, slowing only because he would have to hit some of the Uruk-Hai commanders twice before they died. In DnD, if the entire Fellowship focused on the Host the saga could be re-written as a 12-page short story.

Now all this is pure speculation on my part. I’ve seen the Fellowship a few times, read the books and run a DnD game or two over the past 30 years, so I know some things, but we’re talking about the difference between a movie and an Pencil-and-Paper RPG. Any attempt to convert one to the other is going to be a best-guess on the part of the converter. Maybe Gimli is only 4th level and the Uruk Hai are all 9th level warriors, but I doubt it.

I don’t think you could do a faithful reproduction of the Lord of the Rings in a DnD campaign. I think that’s part of the reason I find your comic so amusing, Shamus. It humorously points out the many places DnD falls short in delivering on its high-adventure fantasy gaming promise while simultaneously poking fun at the stories that led directly to its creation, the Lord of the Rings saga.

You are kidding, right? Each orc is going to get at least one attack before they die, and will hit on a 20, maybe less. Against 10000 orcs, that’s at least 500 hits, or thousands of points of damage. The only way you’re going to survive that is enough DR so they can’t hurt you at all, and Middle-Earth is a low magic setting.

See, this is (kind of) why I don’t like (nor play with) auto hit on 20. I think rolling a natural 20 followed by a natural 100 on a % die could work though. Similar for natural 1s, however as blunders would be more common than utter lack of skill hitting a mega tank I think I’d make it 1 followed by another natural 1.

I almost always love winning initiative with my current char. See, he’s a level 8 Paladin, and has personality that makes him take every possible chance to jump in front of the rest of the party and be the meatshield. It creates plenty of trouble, but hey, that’s the way of the Lawful Good… Or something.

Actually, in the old LotR roleplaying game, orcs could level up exactly like the PCs, so you face orc chieftans who might be 15th-20th level. Yeah, most of them are 1st level grunts, but there were plenty of the tougher fellows, too.

On a more serious note, Gimli only managed to do something useful when the wall finally got breached. Dwarven fighters on human walls are there to repel siege ladders and towers.

And yes, taken strictly, it’s difficult to simulate realistic battle conditions using d20. It’s not impossible, but it takes work. Especially since standard d20 doesn’t have rules for battle-fatigue and being overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

The Heroes of Battle supplement is good. Not great, but good. Gives a fair amount of flavor for ways that the PCs can interact with and affect a battle, and also gives good rules for PCs as commanders of squadrons of the army. But there’s no perfect solution; D&D just isn’t a wargame despite its ancestry.

Doesn’t the “Gimli runs wipes out the host of Mordor” argument always run into the “5% of all rolls are natural 20s, and no one survives 100 arrow hits” objection? A high-level party with spellcasters and such might be able to wipe out an army of thousands if they convenientlhy line up, but one fighter or even a grup of fighters can’t. The only chance is to close to melee range immediately (so you’re never faced with 10000 archers), win initiative, and always be able to Cleave your way through every enemy within range before they can move. Still won’t work if the bad guys remember that they can Charge…

I remember reading that when they animated this battle, it was impossible for them to manually animate all the orcs, so they wrote an AI to take care of it. Problem was, the orcs kept routing. At a certain point the AI started screaming “Run away! Run away!” They had to change the AI algorithm to prevent that so that the orcs would stay and let themselves be slaughtered.

On a different point, a well-designed medieval fortification is an unbelievable force multiplier. During the crusades, there was a Crusader fort in Lebanon which stood against siege for years with only a few dozen defenders.

One thing I’ve realized is that a big horde of low level warriors could challenge any level to some degree. They’re not just going to stand around a high level PC and make an attack, just look at Amon Hen, Aragorn literally has to punch and struggle out of grapples. I usually have the first half-dozen/dozen orcs try to grapple a single PC, the next half-dozen/dozen attack, the next half-dozen/dozen overrun and etc. Plus if none of this works there is tripping, sundering and many other means of putting even a high level character in check.

A single PC of high level might cut down quite a few enemies but he alone is not going to cut down an army since mostly it can just plow right past him and hold him at bay while the rest of the army fights the rest of the other army.

Woerlan Says:
And yes, taken strictly, it’s difficult to simulate realistic battle conditions using d20. It’s not impossible, but it takes work. Especially since standard d20 doesn’t have rules for battle-fatigue and being overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

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First off, where pray-tell, is the reply-to or quote function on here?

Secondly, while D&D doesn’t have a combat-weariness system (fatigue in the Wound Point variant is from taking damage, not the act of fighting) I would say that there are indeed rules for overbearing: The Aid Another Action.

There’s 8 squares adjacent to a medium-sized player character and (with reach weapons) another 16 outside of that. The enemy delays their actions to ready-up and charge as one, with half of them using their +2 bonuses to increase the AC of the monster with the best grapple modifier (preventing a great cleave from wiping them out) and the other half using their +2 bonuses to improve the lead grappler’s attack bonus. Most of the enemy will be capable of hitting AC 10 (don’t forget the attack bonuses for flanking and charging) so that’s a pretty hefty bonus to both surviving any AoOs and also to pulling down Mr. Conan over there.

Even thru attrition, with enough enemies coordinating on the Aid Another actions, the warrior will get scratched up and when the finally need to pop a potion that’s a whole world of AoOs on their hide. With enough numbers even low-CR enemies can pose a serious threat — just consider rush-hour traffic. ;)

Assist Other – Hit AC10 to give your buddy either a +2 to Attack or AC.

Let’s see… There are eight spaces around a character, if we’re not assuming any reach weapons. Four attacks at +4 (Flank + Assist) are already looking good. Double up, and it’s two attacks at +8 for those really hard to reach places.

Did somene say “reach”? Assume reach weapons, and you can have up to 24 attackers for each target… That’s eight attacks at +2 and four at +4. Or really max it out for four attacks at +12 (Flank and five assists each).

I always laugh at my warrior players when they don’t bother taking a ranged weapon of any kind. This situation is precisely why lol. Even when you take a penalty to hit … 10,000!! It’s like firing into a lake and expecting to hit … air? duh!

I’ve seen many references to DnD and other popular D20 systems concerning mass combat (yes i realize the idea is based on DnD). For something like this I’d try to convert from the Roll/Keep system AEG uses. Much faster and easier. Not to mention the rediculous amounts of rediculousness you can get your players into. Gimli wants to surf? Go for it!

I think my DM offers us a chance to defer if we choose not to act on high initiative (basically you can choose to attck as opportunity arises and interrupt a foe’s strike), or use it to roll play alerting the other paty members. Also good for sneaks who can set traps quickly…

When you don’t want to go immediately, there’s two things you can do – Delay, or Ready.

Delay won’t let you interrupt anything, and Ready lets you select an action (Standard Action) that will go right before a predetermined trigger condition.

The benefits of Delay is that you’ll be able to do something regardless of if the triggered condition goes off.

For example, if you Ready an attack for when the orc charges you, right when he gets in range but before the orc gets his attack, you get to strike. From that point on, your init is right before his. However, if he chooses instead to (for example) cast a Summon Monster spell, you’ll have to wait until your normal init comes around again before you can act (thus wasting a round). If you had delayed, you would simply go after the orc then during that round, and hopefully disrupt his spell.

Er? is the comment engine b0rxed or something? I made a reply to #38 when there were only 43 posts on here and it didn’t show up. When I tried to redo it the site said duplicate post and so I just assumed it was a moderated list and had to await approval. However, now I see that it never took. :(

In any event at least Telas managed to get a post up about flanking w/ reach and Aid Another. Like I *tried* to say before, lots of low-CR creatures (even with low Int) can be dangerous… just look at rush hour traffic. ;)

That’s incorrect. The correct statement is that *each* roll of a d20 has a 5% chance of rolling a 20. But that chance remains the same for *every* roll. Your statement implies that if you roll a d20 twenty times, you will roll each number once (as, if 5% of all rolls are natural 20s, then 5% of all rolls are *also* natural 1s, 2s, 3s, etc., etc.). This is clearly a fallacy (actually, it’s called “The Gambler’s Fallacy,” and casino owners make a lot of money off of people who are *certain* the next roll must be a seven because they haven’t rolled a seven all night). In short, it is entirely possible for 10,000 orcs to attack Gimli and never once roll a natural 20. It’s not *likely*, but it is possible. In any case, rolling a d20 10,000 times does not automatically mean you will roll five hundred 20s. (Though it might mean you’re at risk of a repetitive strain injury…) Probability can catch you napping, if you don’t think about it carefully.

By the way, the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game: The Two Towers boxed set includes skirmish scenarios for the attack on Helm’s Deep— and some killer photos of an incredible 28mm scale reproduction of Helm’s Deep. The game’s approach is indeed to treat the battle as isolated fights surrounding the heroes, rather than a match up against 10K orcs. For the latter, you’d want something like Warmaster or Hordes of the Things. AD&D used to offer Battlesystem, which was designed for large scale miniatures wargaming (though not 10K individual Uruk-hai!), while the “Basic” D&D Companion Rules (circa 1984-91) included a system called “The War Machine” for conducting battles on an abstract level.

That’s a nitpicky distinction. Out of 10000 rolls, 500 20s is the most likely result, and it’s just as likely to be more as it is to be less. You can be 95% certain that it will be in the range 456-544, and 99.7% sure it will be in the range 435-565. The odds of no 20s out of 10000 rolls? 1.7E-223. That’s as close to impossible as makes no difference.

When I play with my ranger, she takes a elven court longbow, astral blade longsword +1 and namarra neversleep rapier +1 (she has ambidexterity when wearing light armour). First shot is always with the longbow from maximum range (normally with an acid arrow), then as the enemy starts running toward her she switches to longsword and rapier in time to get an attack of opportunity when the enemy runs into melee range. If she spots the enemy before it sees her, she gets at least two attacks in before anything has a chance of hitting her, and frequently more if the original distance was greater than the enemy can cover in a single round. This is in NWN1 rather than a pen and paper campaign, but I’m pretty sure NWN1 runs on the D20 ruleset so it should still apply.

First time comment. First off – great strip. Thank you very much for all the hard work.

Secondly – all this talk of what Gimli’s possible actions could be against a horde of orcs reminds me of a small flaw in the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system. For those that don’t know, that system allowed you to move from career to career along a decision tree (i.e. one of the Rogue tracks was rat catcher to cutpurse to highwayman, etc.). Each career move would give you the opportunity to also level up some of your stats. Well, Dwarves had the chance to start the game with a high Toughness stat, making them hard to damage when hit. Given enough longevity, and a selection of just the right career choices, and a Dwarf character could achieve high enough Toughness that almost no normal melee weapon in the game could wound him. Naked, he’d be better protected by his hign Toughness than most human fighters decked out in full plate mail. And WHFRP was not a world exactly overflowing with magical armor-piercing weapons. Hence, “the Naked Dwarf Syndrome”. Your Dwarf character, a la Gimli on the walls, could strip down and launch himself into the horde of Orcs, and have a good chance of coming out relatively unscathed on the other side, given the Orcs not having any magical Toughness-reducing or auto-wounding weapons.

Granted, the WHFRP was so deadly that most player’s characters rarely made it through their second career before losing some vital body part, or going mildly insane, and needing to retire to a small hovel in the country to tend a turnip patch.

Considering that dwarves are supposed to be masters of stonework and fortifications it’s always seemed wrong to me the way they’re always portrayed as predominantly meleé fighters. Sure they’re great in meleé — one GM I played under ruled that a single dwarf, being 4′ high by 4′ wide by 4′ deep (his milieu), could hold a 10′ wide corridor — but no one builds a fortification just to wait behind it for the enemy to either get bored, break through, or die of old age (remember that D&D orcs live ~40 years to a D&D dwarf’s ~300).

A few sheep bombs would have probably made interesting inroads on the orc horde (baa! Baa! BOOM!) but considering the low level of technology I’d have expected a dwarf to come up with some way to while away the wait: some largish rocks, maybe some boiling oil or lead, maybe even a crossbow.

Dear gods, I remember that old system. The most common phrase heard at my table was “cough up a Fate Point”…

As for the battle, strictly by the rules… with Great Cleave–and the accompanying 5-foot step that 3.5 allows–a single warrior could make quite a swath as long as he never rolled a 1. The moment he did it would pretty much be over, especially if the orcs had some feat like Spring Attack or Run By Attack.

Of course, any DM who stays strictly by the rules without a little tweaking for scenario once in a while deserves exactly what the dice give him.

What does a 5-foot-step have to do with it? You only get one of those per round, and you specifically can’t take it between Cleave attacks. With Great Cleave, you can kill the 8 orcs in your reach, then 8 more will move into range and attack you. And they will score some hits. (If attacked 8 times, there’s >33% chance for one or more 20s)

The obvious problem with all these strategies: The XP will be for a defeat of the army, not for killing a few orcs. Shooting wildly will kill orcs but will be a waste of ammo since the arrow-to-XP ratio is zero. Ditto the dash-and-great-cleave ploy. All great fun for a bit but no player worth their salt would get tricked into such a poor rate of return, XP-wise, even in this reward-starved campaign.

Best idea: Everyone hunker down and play Mechwarrior until the orcs get dysentery and go home. After all, 300 Elfburgers just arrived, so the fortress larder supplies will last for quite some time.

About what Parzifal said about rolling 10.000 times without getting a 20.
It’s true that there might be an infinitensimal probability that this might happen. However, there is also the “law of great numbers” (I translated directly from Greek, so I don’t know how it’s called in English).
Anyway, this “law” states that if a repeating experiment that has outcomes of some specific probability is carried out a very large number of times, the percentage of each outcome will be very close to the corresponding probability.
Therefore, assuming the die is not “balanced”, rolling it 10.000 times will provide with 200 plus/minus “something” natural 20s.

As for the comic. Keep up the good work! I expect a fight about xp during the Legolas/Gimli bodycount.

NWN is a horrible thing to base any knowledge of D&D on. We had a formerly competent player corrupted by it. (For example… Color Spray through the front ranks. “You what?” “What, it effects enemies only!” “No. NO. No it doesn’t.”)